In 1969, long before South Beach became the super-chic living end that it is today, a red-nosed and stubble-bearded alcoholic at the cockroach-invested and flea-ridden Colony Hotel told me that the decrepit southern end of Miami Beach inhabited mostly by poor old Jewish folk was “the end of the world. There’s nowhere to go when you’re really down and out, sonny,” he said, pointing at the ocean, “but out there, to drown.”

I didn’t give suicide much thought at the time, as I had more pressing concerns. I barely had the bare necessities of life paid for that month. I sold a pint of blood for starters. I scraped dried-up banana peels off the deck of a ship, and then I worked for while loading trucks at bankruptcy auctions. My success was assured when I was hired as the night clerk at the Pennsylvania Hotel, where I was given lodging in the freight elevator housing on the roof. I lived on breakfast specials, and half-rotten fruit and vegetables I bought at discount at the market, and saved half of my pay every week, inserting a twenty-dollar bill in every ten pages of a Bible I found in the lobby. I didn’t read scripture that much, but I did preoccupy my spare time reading Russian novels, as well as my favorite book during storms, Moby Dick, so the guests gave me the benefit of the doubt and called me “rabbi.” As a matter of fact, I was not religious at all; my father was a non-practicing Jew; my stepmother, a fundamentalist Christian, tried to make a Christian of me before I ran away from home, but to no avail. I felt that the Christians I encountered at her church were phonies: They kept telling me that their Jesus loved me, and I knew from their behavior that they did not, so what good was their Jesus to me?

As my good luck would have it, a pot-smoking Jewish American Princess who had been ditched on the train down South by her sugar daddy wound up in my lap one night. I followed her back to New York. The affair did not last long as my presence interfered with her career as a porn star, so I used the balance of my savings to fly to Waikiki, where I went broke and got a job with a hotel tycoon in the nick of time. He didn’t pay me much, but he taught me a major secret of success: if you walked up to ten girls on Kalakaua Avenue and asked them to screw, one of them, on the average, would say yes, so don’t get upset if you get slapped in the face until then.

Little did I know that I would return to South Florida just before Hurricane Frances and the Dalai Lama landed, or that an Internet chat-room friend, an ex-Navy SEAL whose Internet handle was ‘Doc’, would rescue me from the storm and take me to the Clay Hotel, Al Capone’s old gambling hideout on South Beach. Speaking of the Mob, my one-legged friend Doc, may he rest in piece, told me interesting stories about hanging out as a kid with Meyer Lansky and company – his mom had married one of Lansky’s sons. South Miami Beach had changed considerably in my absence. The poor man’s paradise had been gentrified by a new sort of vulgar people, the nouveau gentry. The cost of living was high, and the low-paying jobs that served the high-livers were not easy to get unless one spoke both Spanish and English. I found myself going broke, which would have been a damn shame for a man my age in this money-grubbing Age of Greed, especially if he didn’t smoke crack and drink and stumble along Washington Avenue swearing like a sailor at the top of his lungs. His predicament is certainly not our fault – he’s obviously mentally ill and has refused to go into rehab and take legitimate drugs.

Shame has always given self-titled noblemen like myself due cause for suicide, hence I proudly confess that, after my recent return to South Beach, the fear of becoming homeless where homelessness is now so despicable caused me to consider drowning myself off the beach at the end of Lincoln Road, where there is no lifeguard station. Of course few people take pride in self-murder nowadays, so I would make sure to pick a red-flagged riptide day, and sneak into the water wearing swimming trunks in order to make my drowning look like an accident. At least my children would not be further disgraced by the fact I was their estranged father. Besides, I still had an accidental death insurance policy, for which the premiums were duly deducted every quarter from my meager checking account; therefore they would have the death benefit to boot, which might posthumously boost their opinion of me.

Lady Luck came to the rescue yet again. Or, as Oprah Winfrey would have it, I was graced and blessed by the divine source, a source that is not necessarily religious, if I understand her rightly, because regular religion is not that popular among the growing numbers of New Age fans, who are looking forward to the advent of a brand new kind of Christ presaged by such prophets as formerly homeless Neale Donald Walsch, who reinvented God in his seminal series, Conversations With God.

Neale Donald Walsch’s self-dialogues are of particular interest to me because Tracey Flagler, my sweet next door neighbor, who idolized Oprah Winfrey, was possessed by Conversations and related New Age culture before she sacrificed her life to the gods in South Beach. Mr. Walsch was apparently spoiled by unusually permissive and loving parents, and his would-be omnipotent god or child within was victimized by the world he encountered, the hated Western World with its pompous religion, higher authorities, rights and wrongs, shalls and shall nots. He was thoroughly pissed off – four failed marriages and unsatisfying relations with his children aggravated him all the more – so he went on the homeless path and angrily addressed his god along the way, noting well his god’s answers. He won the wrestling match, and emerged with best-selling books instead of a pronounced limp. Nietzscheism had of course forgiven him and his readers in advance; or rather there was nothing to forgive since right and wrong are wrong ideas to begin with. Every victim of Western civilization can find temporary relief in Conversations with God. The intelligentsia refrain from openly guffawing at the popular discourse lest they lose their politically correct status. Intelligent fascists used to chuckle privately when Hitler promised something for everyone, except the Either/Or Jews – hate-based group-love needs a new scapegoat: the West will do. Muslims may take a big bow soon: they are in effect frustrated Jews who need to protest their religion and become postmodernists. Postmodernism tolerates all cultures except the traditional hierarchical culture of the West, which has given untold millions of Judeo-Christians cause to suffer needlessly. Nazism, with its return to pagan spiritualism and barbaric natural religion, is tolerated or embraced despite its right-wing authoritarian tendency, a big-corporation tendency with which the hated capitalist West has a presiding affinity – leftist ideologues perhaps correctly noted that fascism is the perfection of capitalism.

Mr. Walsch is professedly a writer, editor, and public relations man by trade. Ten years before he went on his road tour with his god, he called himself Neale Marshall-Walsch and served as public relations professional for such New Age figures as Terry Cole-Whittaker, minister for the New Age Church of Religious Science. Suffice it to say that the New Age is nothing new to him – or to anyone for that matter, for it is in fact a reversion, or regression, if you prefer, despite the progressive claims. However that might be, his god made numerous contradictory statements to him from within during his homelessness sojourn without – he profited handsomely on his dialogues with his permissive superego after they were published, even the more so after Oprah said Conversations with God was one of her favorite books.

For instance, Mr. Walsch asked his god if suicide is wrong. An evasive answer was spit up to him from within; that is, from the subjective realm beyond relative good and evil: “The question cannot be answered to your satisfaction, because the question itself contains two false concepts; it is based on two false assumptions; it contains two errors. His first false assumption is that there is such a thing as "right" and "wrong." The second false assumption is that killing is possible. Your question itself, therefore, disintegrates the moment it is dissected. ‘Right’ and ‘wrong’ are philosophical polarities in a human value system which have nothing to do with ultimate reality—a point which I have made repeatedly throughout this dialogue. They are, furthermore, not even constant constructs within your own system, but rather, values which keep shifting from time to time.”

Furthermore, his god told him that, although “death does not exist,” death is “always a gift” and “You are the cause of your own death. This is always true, no matter where, or how, you die,” that is to say that “you cannot die against your will.”

Well, then, it would appear that every death is in fact a suicide, dying is merely an act for drama’s sake on this stage we call the world, and suicide is therefore a pretense and perhaps a complete farce at that. However comforting that might be to enlightened people, I had seen corpses and I had experienced grief hence I was somewhat anxious over the possibility of my own non-existent death by my own hand. Instead of going for a fatal swim one early morning as planned, I decided to surrender to whatever might happen. My cowardice was rewarded with a call from La Mujer de Oro de Coral Gables, Florida – she had a temporary job for me counting other people’s money, paying two-and-one-half times what I had been asking for.

I counted my blessings. It was as if I had been saved from the abyss by Moby Dick, the great white whale, and had been spit up on land from the depths of despair to scour the beach for ambergris yet to be happy enough with a few empty shells or sea-shekels. Not that I praised the Lord or rushed off to a temple convinced of the existence of that Negatively Existent One alluded to by the Tetragrammaton. The great white fish, I speculated, had always been my mystical temple, the nuclear-powered Nautilus that conveyed me from shore leave to shore leave, just as the mosque is the great white camel that carries the Muslim across the barren desert, and just as the great white elephant carries the Hindu god through the demonic forest. I don’t know why, but despite my salvation I used my spare time to compose biting diatribes against the very society that was feeding me. One bitter tome, on permanent, either-or truth, I entitled ‘Doom is Nigh Again’. Since something within me is merciful, I have a compassionate sequel in mind, on relative truths, which I shall entitle ‘Doom Indefinitely Postponed Again’.

How could I be so ambivalent? How could I be such a hypocrite as to curse the octopus that feeds me, and even go so far as to curse the All Mighty? Excuse me, my confusion is causing me to sink into a trance: “Never mind, don’t feel guilty,” I hear Neale Donald Walsch’s god saying, “you will join Hitler in heaven.” “What say you? Hitler in heaven? But Hitler was dead wrong!” “Hitler did nothing wrong,” responds the postmodern neo-pagan god. “Hitler simply did what he did, although he thought he was doing the right thing.” “That’s what all right-wingers say when they do wrong, that they are doing the right thing.” “I have said time and time again that there is no right and wrong in the universe.” “But Hitler was still a monster!” “Your opinion that Hitler is a monster is based on the fact that he ordered the killings of millions of people, but as I have said, millions thought he was right, and death does not exist, anyway. Hitler didn''t hurt anyone. In a sense, he didn''t inflict suffering, he ended it.” “Nonsense! Death must exist if millions were killed. My family on my father’s mother’s side was murdered in the camps.” “Let me tell you,” declares the neo-barbarian god, “that what you call death is the greatest thing that could happen to anyone, for at the moment of your death you will realize the greatest freedom, the greatest peace, the greatest joy, and the greatest love you have every known.” “Will numerous blond and blue-eyed virgins with large breasts and big thighs be waiting for me in an icy wonderland?” “But of course.” “Then let my god tell you this – the name of your god is god spelled backwards!” “Not!” “My god is better than your asinine, ass-sniffing dog.” “My god is not a dog! Oprah Winfrey recommends my god, and her people said she didn’t air the two-hour interview with me because the people are not ready for my advanced perspective on the advent of our charismatic New Age Christ., who will unify the world one day.” “Oprah’s audience is not ready for another Hitler yet, that’s why she turned you down – she’s not stupid, she’s read Tolstoy, she’s an intellectual.” “You must read my Conversations with God.” “My god is better than your god,” I heard my voice singing, “my god is better than your god, my god is better than your god, my god is better than your god….”

Egads! Excuse me. Where was I? Yes, ambivalence. Spit up by the whale. Like Jonah, I suppose, to preach doom. They say Jonah is a minor prophet. Sophisticated rabbis have said that he didn’t want to preach doom at Nineveh as the Lord had commanded, because he figured the Lord would make a fool of him yet again by forgiving the repenting heathen and sparing Nineveh, just as Jerusalem had allegedly been spared despite Jonah’s prophecy of its destruction, wherefore Jonah’s reputation as a “true prophet,” gained by the fulfillment of his prophecy in the time of Jeroboam II, would be fully ruined, for true prophecy comes true at least half the time if not always. So the rabbis said that Jonah fled from the prospect of being shamed by the Lord he so adored. He hired a ship and took to sea, but when the vessel was confronted by the Lord’s apparent wrath, in the form of a storm, Jonah asked the sailors to throw him overboard that they might be saved from his Hebrew nemesis. They did so and were converted to faith in the one-god when the sea was immediately becalmed. Jonah was swallowed by the fish, and contemplated the grandeur of the Lord from his submarine, longing to be once again in the Holy Temple, but he had never left it, and the whale of a fish spewed him up on land again, where the command was once again given, to prophecy disaster to the wicked inhabitants of Nineveh.

But Jonah was angered, and I think not because the Lord had made a fool of him for prophesying a false outcome, as many teachers would have us believe, but because the Lord was merciful and did not bring disaster down upon the heads of the wicked. Good Grief! When, after all, will justice finally be done? When will the wicked get exactly what they deserve? When will “I’m sorry” not be good enough? When will Justice tire of one repentance after another, which enables the wicked to sin again and again? I think the text makes Jonah’s motive plain:

“This, O Lord, is what I feared when I was in my own country, and to forestall it I tried to escape to Tarshish: I knew that thou art a god gracious and compassionate, long-suffering and ever constant, and always willing to repent of the disaster. And now, Lord, take my life: I should be better dead than alive.”

I think Jonah had had enough of mercy and forgiveness. But that is just my opinion: I am not licensed to practice religion and my opinion is not intended to be spiritual advice; for that one should consult a bona fide spiritual master.

Oprah Winfrey is perceived as the high priestess of the postmodern relativity religion. Young women, especially those who believe there is something wrong with them, that they are weird or freakish, women such as my late neighbor Stacey Flagler, hang on her every word as gospel. Her veracity is proven by her wealth. Her endorsement of books such as Conversations of God sends sales through the roof. Almost every liberal-minded person loves Oprah Winfrey, and Yours Truly would love to be on her show and have her endorse this living novel in progress. I would raise myself to the full height of my mediocrity and say something to please everyone regardless of their characteristics, so that everyone might enjoy the cake. Then I would lower the boom.

WINFREY: Walter, are we all equal or not?

DAVIDSON: Everybody is equal no matter what.

WINFREY: Right.

DAVIDSON: I mean equal under our law.

WINFREY: OK, the courts should not discriminate against us because we are rich or poor, gay or straight, or because of our colors, looks and faiths, right?

DAVIDSON: Right. And there is a titanic struggle going on between good and evil on at the highest level, and justice will be done below.

WINFREY: Good and evil, hmmm. That is what your purchase-on-demand book, Doom is Nigh Again, was all about, right? It didn’t sell so well?

DAVIDSON: Yeah, yeah, it was a failure, I sold only twenty-nine copies, to friends and acquaintances, and gave another twenty copies away, to reviewers, and I sent along a copy to your people. I maintained that true faith is faith in justice, faith that it shall be done some day no matter what, although nobody knows exactly when, and on that day everybody will be accounted for by a valid statistical methodology. Evildoers on balance would be doomed once and for all.

WINFREY: Uh-huh, but then you thought justice would be too hard on too many people, you believed they needed to be forgiven and loved, so you changed your mind?

DAVIDSON. Yeah, so I wrote Doom is Postponed Indefinitely.

WINFREY: It’s a blessed book, a best seller.

DAVIDSON: Thank you. I am so delighted that you recommended it. But sometimes I have my doubts about its relative truths, and wish the prophecy of a lasting doom mentioned in my first book would come true, because then prophecy would be so alarming that people would really repent, if there were anyone left to do so. I think there are too many false prophets among us today.

WINFREY: Oh, no, Walter. We have had enough dooms all ready, don’t you think. I think everyone got the point. Where did you get that idea, anyway?

DAVIDSON: From the Book of Jonah and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.

WINFREY: I saw the movie. The whale got away. The black whales got killed and cut up. And I remember Jonah warned people, and they were sorry, and they got away.

DAVIDSON: Melville had a thing about whiteness, about its purity, but he wasn’t prejudiced. I think Jonah got mad at God because God forgave them instead of making an example of them.

WINFREY: OK, we have a commercial coming up, and before that I want to….

DAVIDSON: Ope, I think if you read Moby Dick all the way through, you would highly recommend it. May I read something quickly from this copy I brought you?

WINFREY: Well, uh, thank you, but this is not on the….

DAVIDSON: Please, Ope, please?

WINFREY: OK. Be quick.

DAVIDSON: “Jonah did the Almighty’s bidding. And what was that, shipmates? To preach the Truth to the face of Falsehood! That was it! This, shipmates, this is that other lesson; and woe to that pilot of the living God who slights it. Woe to him whom this world charms from Gospel’s duty! Woe to him who seeks to pour oil upon the waters when God had brewed them into a gale. Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appall! Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness! Woe to him who, in this world, courts not dishonor! Woe to him who would not be true, even thought to be false were salvation! Yea, woe to him who, as the great Pilot Paul has it, while preaching to others is himself a castaway!”

WINFREY: Wow! OK, when we come back, we will find out why Paris Hilton abandoned her career, gave her fortune away to charity and took vows of poverty.